Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 803 Tuesday May 23 1995                                                                                                                       10p 
SWB 119 printed twice by error. SWB 120/121 this issue

Another phony 'discipline' stunt staged by the Commons Conmen Ltd cannot conceal the real divisions undermining ruling-class ranks, as trade-war clouds threaten new world upheavals. Only Leninist science can help workers, not fake-'leftism'.

Regardless of the sordid cover-up of mercenary deception by 'Sir' Jerry Wiggin MP, - suicidal divisions are beginning to open in the Tory ranks as they stumble from one political disaster to the next. This new scandal will only add to the turmoil.

Thatcher's isolationist contempt for Major & Co's feeble indecision over standing firmly against closer Common Market integration around German imperialist power, follows closely upon the Government's Nolan fiasco.

But the whole mess of conflict flows not just from one terrifying dilemma here or one un-whitewashed pile of sleaze there, but from the overall paralysis and insoluble contradictions facing dying British imperialism generally.

The ruling class does not stumble over a disagreement and then fall apart; it begins disintegrating totally as a broad perspective in a longterm and partly hidden trend, and then finds picky reasons to start kicking lumps out of each other openly, more and more frequently, more and more outspokenly.

Murdoch is only half right in his interview about the British ruling class preferring to bitch and moan and laze around instead of rising to the competitive entrepreneurial challenge which is overwhelming Britain.

In theory, domestic monopoly capital could respond successfully to any difficulties posed by the ever-sharpening international trade war, in communications or anything else. But in practice, many of the competing conglomerates are not going to survive, by the very nature of the cutthroat anarchy of the market place.

And there will come a time fairly soon when minor trade-war restrictions and irritations start getting so heavy that world trade itself begins to crumble. At that point, every conglomerate can start doing badly, even while still scoring mortal points against a rival.

All of Murdoch's comments made the ridiculous assumption that capitalist booms go on for ever, with any notion to the contrary "got rid of when the Berlin Wall came down".

They also ludicrously assume that all problems of taste, political justice, scientific objectivity, educational altruism, etc, will also all be solved to worldwide satisfaction by the harsh realities of the market place and its profit-oriented choices, - as far as the media are concerned.

But it has never been true under capitalism that any sphere of production has ever been able to be left to be solely regulated by the profit and loss dictates of the free-enterprise market.

Just the opposite. The longer the capitalist system has survived, the more widespread and vociferous have been the demands that certain standards be set and adhered to in the production of everything from food and medicines to media and educational products.

The illegal street trading in addictive drugs, pornography, and vice, etc, could be said to argue that restrictions on markets under capitalism do not solve many problems either. But the real point is that while unlimited free-market access to anything anyone wanted might eventually cure them of the want by finally convincing everyone how destructive and shoddy the taste for that thing was, most people in the meanwhile could be dead, doomed, or utterly corrupted beyond repair.

This problem with capitalism is even more obvious when it comes to the question of the free-market arms race, and notions of unlimited licence for any monopoly imperialist economic powers to pursue any policy they wanted in pursuit of profit.

The end result of that has only ever been inter-imperialist war, and can never be any different until the dictates of profit no longer dominate human affairs, i.e. until market anarchy has been forcibly replaced by international planned economic development, which could only ever possibly begin when the working class becomes the ruling class worldwide.

The demented mentality of bourgeois market self-righteousness is already well on the march again even before the next devastating international trade war has even been declared open.

It is early days yet, but the irreconcilable nationalist bitterness in the following American big-business comments on Japan's trade policies leave no doubt about the warmongering direction things are heading in:

THE new World Trade Organisation looks set to face its first test in the crisis conditions of the gravest economic dispute in post-war history, after the US yesterday announced a record of almost $6 billion (£3.8 billion) in punitive sanctions on Japanese luxury car exports.

Japan instantly announced an appeal to the WTO, the new trade court established under the Gatt pact, and said it was considering its own retaliatory tariffs, which would start a full-scale trade war between the world s two biggest economies.

With strong backing from the US motor industry and both sides in Congress, President Clinton's trade brinkmanship is likely to prove domestically popular, although it puts at risk America's crucial alliance in the Asia-Pacific region.

"The Japanese government has acknowledged that we have important security and other interests in common, and we cannot let our entire relationship be wrecked by this," the President said yesterday. "That is a welcome observation... but we can't any more deny this or sweep it under the rug."

The sanctions will double the price of all luxury Japanese cars exported to the US, including Honda's Accura models, Toyota's Lexus cars and Nissan's Infiniti series, whose US sales topped $5.9 billion last year.

The target for the punitive tariffs was carefully chosen to avoid Japanese auto parts, since so many of these are bought by Detroit for installation in US models. The tariffs also exclude those Japanese cars manufactured in the US.

The $6 billion target was picked because it amounts to around 10 per cent of this year's expected US manufacturing trade deficit of more than $60 billion with Japan, half of which is composed of cars, trucks and car parts.

"It is quite a shock," said vice-minister Toshihiro Sakamoto, of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. "We will appeal to the WTO. But we will not announce whether we will impose counter-sanctions at the moment."

A report from the Kyodo news agency said that officials from three Japanese ministries were having "detailed discussions about imposing sanctions on US products with high Japanese market shares".

Masaharu Tanaka, executive vice president of Japan's biggest carmaker, Toyota, accused the US government of conducting its trade policy "in a coercive manner, completely beyond our comprehension".

Washington's action was simply unacceptable, he said. "By slapping us with sanctions, they hope we will yield to their parts-purchasing demands. The sanctions announced today will wreak havoc on American dealers and American consumers will suffer too."

The US has successfully tried brinkmanship tactics in the past against Japan over the flat screens used in laptop computers, against Europe over steel exports, and with China earlier this year. But this is by far the highest level of sanctions to be threatened, and the most ambitious in seeking to transform a generation of Japanese trading behaviour.

There was no sign yesterday that the US was in any mood to compromise. Congressional trade committee sources said that the President would have "a lot of backing".

They added that the high level of the yen against the dollar was also putting intense pressure on Japanese car exporters. Japan counters that customers can hardly be made to buy cars they don't want, and the US is really seeking a form of managed trade, under which Japan would agree to buy less competitive or lower-quality US auto parts, simply as a price of doing business in the US.

But the announcement brought cheer to German car exporters, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, against whom the luxury Japanese cars compete intensively.

And right on cue, an outright chauvinistic war party is being formed in the USA, for the moment admittedly only preparing for war against the US government itself, accusing it of destroying America's freedoms over anti-gun legislation.

But the paranoid gun-toting fear of American loss of power is really, of course, about the threat worldwide to the declining might and influence of the US imperialist economic and political hegemony, expressed in isolationist warmongering terms. If they are prepared to gun down Clinton for castrating America, they will certainly be in favour of gunning down the Japanese if told that that is where the real threat to US might lies:

"They hate Bill," said one NRA adviser. "And they want him out."

Now they have the muscle. A huge membership drive has boosted the ranks by nearly a third. And by funnelling money to favoured candidates in last year's mid-term elections, the NRA managed to remove 80 per cent of the gun control advocates it did not like.

Now 225 congressmen have the NRA's "Grade A" rating, giving the gun lobby an effective majority in the House of Representatives. Progress might be trickier in the Senate.

Nevertheless, an indication of the NRA's might came on Saturday night when Mr Dole's rival for the 1996 Republican nomination, Senator Phil Gramm, was the guest of honour. He made all the right anti-Washington noises and proceeded to rattle through the NRAs wish-list, promising them everything they want. Besides the Christian Coalition, there is no group more pivotal in Republican politics.

But the main argument heard in Phoenix was not fun, or even protection from hoodlums. Delegate after delegate said the reason guns were needed was to protect the public from the tyrannical aspirations of the state. Only an armed citizenry could resist the coming dictatorship.

"There's an obvious plan to destroy the fabric of America," said Sheriff Richard Mack, winner of the NRA's Law Enforcement Officer of the Year award.

This is conspiracy-theory, militia talk, and yet it is coming from America's largest pressure group. Washington had better be listening.

It is in the context of ever-more-devastating cut-throat competition that the British ruling class feels increasingly daunted about its own trade-war prospects, leading to the rancorous mood, and further undermining Murdoch's argument that any group of monopoly-capitalists could do anything they wanted if they put their minds to it.

They cannot. The whole point about the forthcoming long period of bitter international trade war is that there are bound to be some spectacular losers, no matter how ruthlessly all the rivals might perform. And it is this that is making the ailing decadent British bourgeoisie sick to the bottom of its soul.

And it is the character of the depth of this crisis which is missed by the whole of the 'opposition' to the Tories, from servilely class-collaborating Labourites to the servilely anti-communist Trots. All kinds of efforts are still being made to find an 'answer' to the economic and political catastrophe the Tories are clearly running into.

But by the whole nature of the colossal coming-together of all the historical strands simultaneously, - the imminent collapse of the postwar 'free world' illusion of 'guaranteed permanently peaceful progress'; the insane self-liquidation by the workers states revisionist leaderships in response to that illusion; the similar self-liquidation of Labour's 'socialism'; the not-unrelated blowing-up of Trotskyite fantasies which parasitically depended on a 'degenerated' Soviet workers state and a vague hope for 'left' Labourism for a living; etc, etc, - something much more profound needs putting to the working class and workers generally than just a bit of smarter Labourite electoralism; or a renewed Trot rant that exhortation alone will transform the health-workers and teachers disputes into a TUC-led General Strike to bring the Major government down immediately; or a vain search for the 'perfect' democratic-centralist structure by the Stalinist remnants of the CPGB; or a pathetic new stab by Ken Loach at saying where the 'perfect' revolution got lost, - somewhere in the dust around the POUM debacle in Barcelona in 1937, or whatever; etc, etc.

Cannot we first hear why all that was glorious in Trotskyism collapsed so ignominiously in the 1980s; or what really should be done about China and Cuba now that anti-communism has proved such a disaster in East Europe; or something credible from a scientific revolutionary angle at last about what was really wrong with Stalinism and its dismal liquidationist suicide, in the light of the towering fascist-slump crisis which is about to drag the whole of the imperialist 'free world' towards a new warmongering holocaust shortly; etc, etc.

Not until all the old anti-communist crap of Labourism, Stalinism, and Trotskyism has been cleaned up will workers be in much of a mood to follow a new revolutionary leadership anywhere.

All the sects involved in the renewed search for a 'perfect revolutionary democracy' have distinguished themselves by sweeping the past under the carpet and avoiding polemics about their own record.

The search for a revolutionary party structure which will be ideal or make political catastrophe avoidable is empty formalism.

A party and a movement evolve out of the struggle for correct understanding. Specific ideas take shape inside specific human heads. The social nature of man and his thoughts about society lead him or her towards collective action.

The failures of resulting communist parties have always occurred because of a mistaken analysis of the world, not because of faulty party structures.

Communist discipline and democracy also flow out of the correctness of ideas, not out of constitutional rules.

The only possible basis for unity is not an agreed democratic structure for party decision-making but a correct analysis of the international class struggle. Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice, no united party struggle.

Ideas have to be fought for. The highest form of the class struggle is the struggle inside the revolutionary party.

The only worthwhile 'rules' are those dictated by the need to take theory into practice.

Argument can only go on for so long before the need to act arises. Once a decision to act has been clearly established in the eyes of most of the party, the requirement for the whole of the party to carry out that decision so as to test it in practice, (the only way to find out if the understanding is correct), - or at least not to sabotage the decision, - is obvious.

The party's action is continuous, first and foremost in its non-stop analysis of the world and the need to put this forward in polemical argument.

Such matters are decided by leadership. Leaders emerge in the battle for correct understanding, proved in practice. In a party of permanently developing revolutionary theory, the consistent best sources of ideas will be obvious.

The democratic essence of a correct scientific analysis of international revolutionary class struggle lies in the fact that the right theory is going to lead quicker to the complete emancipation of the proletariat on a worldwide basis than anything else.

Lenin's correct scientific objective understanding of the need for the Bolsheviks to seize power, when a majority of the central committee dithered in 1917, was the true democracy, - not the barren formality of the vote against him.

When a revolutionary party dares to act in the seizure of power, it invariably does so as a tiny minority of the proletariat and the intelligentsia, and would be voted down heavily if the decision were put to a ballot.

The true democratic spirit of Lenin's understanding that the October 1917 seizure of power was the greatest event yet in the history of mass civilisation became formally obvious in the revolutionary wars when the main forces of the proletariat stood behind Soviet government, and in the subsequent development of the socialist camp, and the defeat of fascist imperialism. The temporary central committee vote against him was a nonsense, relevant only for showing that all formal democracy fetishism is an ass.

The encouragement which the Bolsheviks drew from beginning to win majority votes in the Moscow and St Petersburg Soviets was not because of having won formal democratic approval but because the science of Leninist theory was proving itself correct in practice.

It is not true that "democracy enables the party to consider and decide its line", as the Open Polemic editorial claims. It is success in the struggle for scientific understanding which makes this possible.

And it was not a lack of democracy, or its cultist debasement, which steadily put the Stalinist majority of the CPSU onto the wrong path on so many questions. It was the philistine failure of understanding, an inability to grasp Marxism-Leninism well enough.

And to state that "the kind of relationship that the party has to the class as a whole is determined by the actual practice of democratic centralism within the party" is equally meaningless formalism. The CPGB died because it degenerated towards the same petty-bourgeois centrist mentality which Moscow's bureaucratic revision of Leninism inflicted to a greater or lesser extent on the entire complacent Third International, - not from graft.

The eventual revisionist self-liquidation of the Third International and the CPSU was never a matter to be dealt with by Trotskyite hysterical despair, demanding 'insurrection against counter-revolutionary Stalinism' at every turn from 1923 onwards.

But even less is it a matter to be dealt with now by some completely delusory formalism setting out some supposedly cast-iron infallible structure for democratic centralism.

Dialectical materialist philosophy made massive inroads into civilisation through the 1917 Revolution and subsequent developments worldwide over the next 45 years, but all the time that advance was steadily petering out, even while still gaining new ground.

The imperialist resurgence of bourgeois idealism was still far from finished with. Currently, in appearance, it seems to have regained firm international supremacy with its 'New World Order'. But just the faintest grasp of Marxist-Leninist science will explain how imperialist crisis is relentlessly preparing the ground for by far the deepest and most widespread revolutionary crisis that has ever shattered civilisation, and to which proletarian-dictatorship science can have the only possible answer.

It was the collapse in understanding of world proletarian dictatorship as the only possible future for mankind on the way to communist society which basically undermined the Third International and the CPSU, ousted by all the centrist-revisionist crap about Popular Fronts, peaceful roads to socialism, permanent peaceful coexistence, and the 'quiet self-liquidation' of imperialism.

It was insufficient confidence in the dictatorship of the proletariat which was the real evil of Stalinism, not insufficient confidence in democratic centralism. The KGB and the Berlin Wall needed to be bigger and better, not demolished. The entire Open Polemic campaign for foolproof Democratic Centralism has been barking up the wrong tree.

The OP critique of 'leader centralism' is just as off beam. Leadership just happens to be a fundamental building block of all social development, - in science, in art, in all public life in general. All new thinking must initially spark in individual human brains. To be frightened of leadership is to be absolutely terrified of Marxism-Leninism, - there never were more dominant leaders.

What makes good communists, who will eventually dominate world society, is the willingness to struggle for an independent grasp of what leadership science has already begun to prove is correct understanding of the world.

What stands in the path of such development is petty-bourgeois individualism, cloaked as a fetish for democratic centralism.

The development of communist cadres was of a far higher calibre when the Bolshevik party was 'overly dependent' on Lenin than in the last half of USSR history when the leaders themselves became a completely sad revisionist joke, impressing nobody, - exactly the opposite of what OP has implied.

The better the leadership in understanding the world, the better the cadres. The less authoritatively the leadership speaks in interpreting the world correctly, as in the last years of the idiots in charge of the CPSU, the more paralysed and useless the cadres become.

It is incorrect leadership in analysing the world situation properly which undermines the party's relationship to the class, not 'over-dependence' on leaders, not a problem under Lenin.

And OP is equally wrong to attribute CPSU liquidation to strong leaders. It was exactly the opposite. Gorbachev was a totally philistine nerd, completely dominated by his wife's Amex credit card. He had less communist conviction than the Kremlin cat. Study Leninism. JH

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 120/1 Monday 15th May 1995

The UN's difficulties are a welcome reflection of the crisis of all world bourgeois leadership. Let pacifism keep its despair to itself. The exposure of the UN's 'peace-loving world government' illusions as a bloody and incompetent imperialist farce offers workers an excellent starting-point for the renewed struggle for proletarian dictatorship science.

The current collapse of all the reformist illusions which once surrounded the United Nations is long overdue, and very welcome.

What underlies all the criticisms of the UN, from right and 'left' alike, is the fragmentation and collapse of bourgeois leadership authority under the trade-war hammer blows delivered by the crisis of imperialism.

Whether the criticism comes from outraged petit-bourgeois idealism of the 'left' which cannot stand to see its 'peaceful world government' fantasies torn up before its eyes, or from one or other venomous imperialist bloc, resentful at the resistance encountered in trying to make the UN do its imperialist stooging solely in accordance with its particular would-be world strategy, what is AT ROOT demoralizing and undermining every agency of the UN - blue helmet troops, WHO, UNICEF, the lot - is the failure of bourgeois rule anywhere to stay on top of imperialism's trade-war crisis.

The inability of anybody any longer to go on believing in the United Nations Charter as a serious blueprint for anything at all except more and more warmongering is very bad news for imperialism, but no loss whatever to the vast mass of exploited and war-ridden humanity. The working class can only benefit by the exposure of the 'peace-loving world government' fraud of the UP sacred cow.

For bourgeois pacifism and revisionism, this exposure spells deep trouble, as evidenced at last week's "UN Blues" meeting in Bristol, a 'peace movement' event arranged to discuss the UN's problems.

The chairwoman began by confessing to 'despair' at the way the UN had 'failed to avoid the mistakes of the League of Nations' and had failed to put into effect the peaceful aspirations of the world's 'peoples' as embodied in the postwar Charter.

But this totally misunderstands the objective historical role of both imperialist institutions.

Lenin denounced the UN's prewar predecessor, the League of Nations, not for 'making mistakes', but for being a "thieves kitchen", solely concerned with sharing out the spoils of imperialist war.

What 'mistakes' is it supposed that the League made, which the UN is how so 'tragically repeating'?

The League was a creature of the imperialist stitch-up which concluded WW1, and stood for the subversion of Bolshevik revolution, the continued supremacy of anglo-saxon imperialism, and the containment of German imperialist rivalry. The smokescreen of high-minded principles behind which this fleecing was to continue was there solely to throw modern public opinion off the scent. It was no 'mistake' that these 'principles' went out of the window as soon as class-war realities made this necessary.

The really serious 'mistake' the League imperialists made (because incorrigibly blinkered by their own class perspectives) was in ever supposing that the uneven development implicit from the first in capitalism (leading in its imperialist phase to the alternation of lopsided, unsustainable world booms, and ever more destructive fascist warmongering slumps) could somehow be politicked out of existence by dressing up the existing world-domination arrangements as the permanent basis for 'rational and humane world governance ever after'.

The League found that imperialism could fool some gullible pacifist and reformist sections of public opinion some of the time, but could never prevent the uneven development underpinning its whole existence from eventually leading back to slump and war.

A new pecking order after WW2 required in turn a new smokescreen of 'international law' behind which to consolidate its domination of the world. The liberation of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Red Army in tandem with home-grown partisan forces, the 1949 triumph of communist revolution in China, and the spread of anti-colonial and communist revolts throughout the Old World's former possessions, ruled out a simple re-imposition by imperialism of a League of Nations II.

Instead, a hugely expanded institution was invented, with all sorts of 'democratic'-sounding safeguards for the representation of all 'legitimate' nation states, however tiny, and charged with all sorts of grand-sounding tasks like 'decolonization' and 'development'.

The 'world government' pretentiousness of the new arrangements was a kind of fatuous mimicry of the revolutionary proletarian dictatorship internationalism which imperialism desperately sought to stave off.

But there could never be any question of the UN 'avoiding the mistakes of the League'. The sanctimonious 1945 Charter pledge to 'save the world from the scourge of war' ALWAYS meant precisely nothing.

By the UN's own reckoning, there have been 240 wars since that declaration. And despite imperialism having had to learn to live with the influence of the Soviet socialist camp (until recently), China, and countless decolonized nations from the 'third world', the UN has never, since its creation, been in essence anything other than a tool of Western imperialism, organized behind Washington and the dollar economy. In a world still dominated by imperialism, there could be no other raison d'être.

It was the 'peace-loving' UN which straight after the war set up the Zionist occupation of Palestine as a permanent imperialist armed camp in the heart of the Middle East.

It was the UN which in the '50s put itself at the service of anti-communist reaction over Korea's unfinished communist-led national liberation fight against bullying US imperialism.

It was the UN which responded to Zionism's 1967 blitzkrieg occupation of further Arab territory by passing empty 'resolutions' which US domination guaranteed would never be put into effect. (It is only the unfinished intifada struggle of the Palestinian people which has obliged Zionism to budge the fraction it has, no thanks to either Arafat revisionism or UN handwringing.)

And it was the UN which stood idly by as Zionism invaded the Lebanon, unilaterally declaring part of Lebanon's sovereign territory to be a 'security zone' and subsequently launching dozens of airstrikes against both Palestinian refugees and Lebanese.

So, far from it being the case that the imperialist stooging of the UN is a recent 'shameful dereliction of earlier Charter idealism' etc., this stooging has been the central purpose of its existence since birth.

At any time since the UN was set up, there would have been ample material for the 'peace movement', the United Nations Association etc. to get outraged about regarding the UN's role. If moral outrage at the hypocrisy of the UN were really all there is at issue, there could have been meetings every week from 1945 to 1990 to go into heartrending detail about the horrors the UN was helping to perpetuate in the name of peace and international justice.

What has REALLY changed now, and what is really rattling the cage of every variety of revisionist and pacifist illusion, is that the old postwar settlement is breaking up, the phony Cold War balance is defunct, and US imperialist hegemony is under siege from every quarter.

The UN, as much as NATO, the World Bank, the IMF (and Attlee's Labour party), is a child of the postwar settlement, the whole of which hinged on the United States' unchallenged supremacy in the imperialist pecking order.

But where once the brutal reality of US bullying was obscured by the phony equilibrium of the Cold War (endlessly played out at the UN in the deliberations and resolutions of this pretended halfway-house to rational world government), imperialist crisis has now called time on Cold War certainties and driven the deficit-ridden US dollar economy onto a collision course with its imperialist rivals in Japan and Germany.

Over Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda and the Balkans, the fundamental overproduction crisis (which sets the surplus capital and productive capacity of each imperialist bloc against everybody else's in the struggle to survive by dominating the world market) finds political and military expression in increasingly angry and resentful differences over what strategy the UN should anywhere be pursuing: troops in or out? whose troops? to arm or not to arm? to trade or not to trade? and who gets the lucrative oil/arms contracts?, etc.

With imperialist crisis hotting up, the fabled 'communist threat' buried, and Washington ever more plainly looking to save its own imperialist skin and to hell with everybody else, the incentive for the rest of imperialism to fall into line behind the lead the US gives is getting thinner all the time. The whole 'Pax Americana' rationale on which the UN's 'world government' posturing has been built postwar is disintegrating.

It is not, as pacifism wants to kid itself, that the UN, 'flawed' though it maybe always was, 'nevertheless was humanity's best hope', and that 'mistakes' are now needlessly spoiling that 'best hope'.

It is the other way round entirely. The reason why the UN's brand of 'world reformism' was able to hoodwink as many as it did, helping keep the world safe for imperialist exploitation until the next major smash, was the relative confidence of US imperialist leadership, and its consequent ability to bend 'international law' to its own exploitation requirements.

And it is because the US can NO LONGER rely on being able to convince its former 'free world allies' that the interests of all of imperialism are indistinguishable from the interests of the USA that the true relationship between the UN and imperialism is getting dragged to the surface for all to see and criticize.

The USA (and its half-tolerated decrepit British sidekick) is obliged to bully and badger and wheedle in the most crass and obvious fashion to keep the sanctions in place against Iraq, for its own exploitation and strategic reasons. It is driven to
expose the real relationship between the UN and imperialism in this way because it knows in its bones that it is fighting a losing battle, because oil and arms, not to mention reconstruction of Iraq's devastated infrastructure, are market opportunities from which the rest of imperialism simply cannot allow itself to be banned indefinitely.

And where in Cold War days the US could probably have got the UN to turn up the heat on the chosen enemy by a nod here, a wink there, and some quietly effective bribery and armtwisting, Albright is now reduced to spitting venom into a press microphone to vent her frustration at the UN's reluctance to pour as much fire on Serb heads as Washington would like to see.

Whether over Iraq, Rwanda or the Balkans, it is the sharpening trade-war contradictions now setting the agenda for all international relations which are bringing the UN under criticism from within and without, freeing the hands of every shade of bourgeois opinion in the world that 'all would be well if only the UN hit the Serbs harder' (V.Redgrave, P. Ashdown, M.Foot, R.Cook, M.Albright), or arranged their judicial lynching by 'war crimes tribunal', or brought arms sales to the Bosnians out from under the counter, or put more UN troops in, or took them all out:

THE United Nations secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, yesterday pre-empted any partial withdrawal of the 22,000 peacekeeping troops in Bosnia when he agreed to a "fundamental review" of their role in the increasingly unstable area.

A communiqué issued after a meeting in Paris between Mr Boutros-Ghali and his top aides said: "In the light of increasing attacks against UN peacekeepers, a fundamental review of the role of the United Nations Protection Force is required." At yesterday's meeting, Yasu-shi Akashi, the chief UN representative in the Balkans, said "all possible options" would be discussed, including giving UN troops greater power to retaliate.

France — which has the largest peacekeeping contingent — called for a mandate that would allow peacekeepers to respond "in a stronger manner" to "provocations and to those who are thwarting peace".

France has 4,500 troops in the area and 36 have been killed in the past three years. The latest French casualty, shot in the head in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, on Thursday, is still in a critical condition.

However, Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, told Mr Boutros-Ghali on Thursday that no decision would be taken by France until the government of President Jacques Chirac was installed next Wednesday.

Mr Boutros-Ghali has repeatedly voiced his opposition to any troop withdrawal. Before the talks he said: "My role is to dissuade all states from pulling out of Yugoslavia but, if they decide to, I will be forced to accept their point of view and to take all possible precautions to ensure a successful retreat."

The chief UN spokesman in New York, Joe Sills, said: "I think there's an increasing feeling that in Bosnia...what we are being asked to do is becoming untenable."

What the Bristol meeting gave was a useful glimpse of just how far disillusionment with the 'international law' racket is already spreading in some middle-class circles. After all, the United Nations Association is supposed to be a sort of support group for the 'work' of the UN (i.e. helping to keep up the 'world government' illusions with which the UN surrounds its stooging for imperialism). But with reformist illusions now hanging in tatters, many in the meeting were strenuously critical of UN hypocrisy, especially after hearing a detailed account from one of the speakers of the nightmare of poverty, malnutrition, disease and war-trauma to which the 'humanitarian' UN has condemned a whole generation of Iraqi children with its dirty economic war (to protect US control of Middle East oil revenues).

The sharpness of criticism at this pacifist meeting was such that the speaker sent from the United Nations Association, (whose opening remarks had consisted of one part guarded semi-recommendation that the sanctions against Iraq be lifted and ninety-nine parts misrepresentation of the imperialist blitzkrieg on Iraq as resulting from 'the UN's good New World Order intentions being thwarted by Saddam's evil scheming' etc.) was driven onto the defensive, protesting that the United Nations Association was quite different from the UN proper, about which he had plenty of reservations of his own. This quite understandably prompted someone in the audience to ask just what the Association did stand for in that case, to which no satisfactory answer could be made.

The truth is that neither pacifism nor revisionism can offer any rational perspective behind which such criticisms from disillusioned would-be internationalists could ever be hammered into a serious challenge to warmongering bourgeois imperialism. Only the fight for proletarian dictatorship science can offer that.

And the meeting's final throwaway suggestion, that belief in the Charter's fine-sounding words about the 'world's peoples' ending war might yet be revived by persuading 'civil society' to impose its peaceful will on the governments and states of the world, - was potentially the most pernicious suggestion of all.

Certainly, it is the contradiction between the growth of social productive forces in modern world society, and the fetters on development which capitalism's exploitative social relations increasingly impose, which raises the necessity and opportunity of ending capitalism and capitalist wars. And in this sense, it is indeed the case that the development of modern 'civil society' is what in the end spells doom for outdated imperialist rule.

But the point is that modern 'civil society' is everywhere organized around CLASS rule, and it is only through CLASS struggle that its conditions of existence are transformed. 'Civil society' only moves decisively to end imperialist warmongering where the revolutionary class interest of the proletariat takes the lead, breaking the fetters on development by overthrowing imperialism and imposing proletarian dictatorship rule.

In the absence of any such revolutionary class struggle or explanation, 'civil society' can only be read as deliberately vague and misleading code for capitalist society.

The phrase comes in handy when it comes to pretending that the class-collaboration reformist way of doing things has only temporarily been interrupted by 'too-ideological' Thatcherism, and that the common sense of ordinary, decent 'civil society' will soon be back in the saddle with 'the next Labour government' etc. The comforting class-neutrality of the phrase lends itself to covering up the fact that it is world imperialist crisis which has been driving these class-war developments, and that the terminal degeneration of British capitalist rule did not begin with Thatcher and will not end with the Tories' (supposedly) imminent demise.

And more specifically for Blairite 'communitarian' opportunism, the 'civil society' tag turns into an all-purpose alibi for whatever piece of 'law and order', union-bashing, witchhunting nastiness looks like giving 'new' Labour a temporary populist lift in the polls. Blaming the homeless, unemployed, single parents etc. for 'failing to keep up their end of the social contract in a sufficiently responsible manner' suddenly acquires left-liberal respectability when the 'civil society' wand is waved.

And back on the international scale, Robin Cook too is all for showing the undefeated remnants of Yugoslavia's devastated socialist civilization how 'civil society' is supposed to work, urging the West to promote "a major programme of civic education" in the Balkans, backed up by a UN-funded "free and independent information agency" to "help provide the change of opinion which will be necessary to achieve a political settlement". The carrot is presumably the same kind of 'civic education' USAID is trying to ram down the stubborn throats of Gambian anti-imperialism (see SWB 119), this time with the aim of breaking Serb resistance to imperialism's 'new order' barbarism and incompetence. And the stick with which this arrogant 'lesson in democracy' is to be imposed?

Robin Cook, the shadow Foreign Secretary, endorsed almost without criticism the Government's position, reserving his most scathing remarks for the UN. While the warring sides had used the four months' ceasefire to regroup, rearm and refinance their operations, the UN had done nothing to demilitarise the war zone, he said.

He criticised the UN for overruling the request of the British commander, Lieutenant-General Rupert Smith, for air strikes to retaliate against the Serbs at the weekend.

"Why make a threat if you are not prepared to carry it out?

Gorbachev had the last word to say on 'universal human values' allegedly 'transcending class interests'. Now every one can see what kind of 'civil society' that final retreat from proletarian dictatorship science really led to: a 'common European home' plunged by imperialist crisis into cut-throat exploitation, free market instability, racist chaos and civil war.

It is class struggle, taken to its most conscious scientific level in the struggle to build parties of revolutionary theory, which alone can end imperialist war, by overthrowing imperialism itself.

Build the ILWP. Spread the Bulletin.

DH  (Dominic Hull]

Jingoist propaganda blows up in the establishment' s face.

Real developments in the world imperialist crisis conspired to make this year's VE day 'remembrance' binge one that the ruling class would on balance really rather have forgotten: 

MANY of London's foreign exchange and bond dealers will be summoned into their offices on bank holiday Monday as the City braces itself for another assault on the pound. This follows Friday's surprise decision by the Government not to raise interest rates.

Only the UK and France have officially declared tomorrow's VE Day anniversary a holiday and dealers feel vulnerable after Friday's decision.

"Fears of market unrest have grown to the point that foreign exchange dealers have been warned they may have to work through the bank holiday. The concern is that speculators will be out to test the Chancellor's resolve to defend the value of the pound in the wake of his surprise refusal last week to raise interest rates.

All the funk about an immediate crucifixion of sterling turned out to have been wrong (on THIS occasion), like all the other bourgeois economic forecasts. But the sight of the City bourgeois cowering through the whole VE weekend, terrified that closing the Bank of England EVEN FOR ONE DAY might result in a massacre of the national currency, stuck in the mind as a much better indication of the REAL state of ruling class confidence than all the VE day fireworks put together.

The irony of Britain and France shutting up shop for the day to celebrate 'victory', whilst the 'losers' got on with the serious business of advancing their own positions in the currency and trade wars to come, could be lost on nobody.

Far from providing a hassle-free jingoist distraction to soften the electoral blow, the VE hype ran into one propaganda own-goal after another, from the Churchill papers rip-off to attempts to cash in Major's phony 'man of peace' credentials in Ireland, showing up the difficulties ahead for degenerate bourgeois rule in trying to convince modern society that aggressive chauvinism is really the politics to live and die by.

By so clumsily ransacking wartime nostalgia in hopes of electoral advantage (at once dashed), the Tories only helped deepen the hole in which the entire British ruling class finds itself, and not the crippled Tory regime alone.

The Churchill farce threw a spanner into the disinformation works with immaculate timing. The greedy cynical opportunism which would happily dig up its own grandfather and flog him to the national lottery if there was a profit to be turned is not, as ever-so-humble Labour 'critics' like to pretend, some awful 'disgrace to the universally revered memory of his grandfather', but an entirely representative sample of the sordid class motivation which drives all capitalist leadership at all times, - and ESPECIALLY its leadership in time of imperialist war.

All the wartime Churchillian 'bulldog' spirit and two finger salute ever really amounted to was a lot of overblown rhetoric about the defence of 'freedom', 'democracy' and 'British decency', covering over the real greedy battle for colonies and market share in desperate pursuit of the bourgeois imperialist class interest at whatever cost.

None of the parliamentary reptiles will admit to the sordid, grabbing imperialist reality of capitalist Britain's war aims, preferring to share the comfortable myth of Churchill having led a 'war for democracy', a 'war against fascism', even a 'war to save the Jews', rather than a war to defend the status quo of anglo-saxon imperialist domination of world markets against imperialist rivals.

Admitting to the predatory and anti-communist character of Britain's war aims (wanting to shore up its monopoly capitalist positions against imperialist rivals by hanging on to the colonial and annexationist fruits of earlier bloodletting, and like a dog with two tails at the idea that with a bit of luck the proletarian dictatorship authority of the Soviet Union might also be fatally wounded by the ordeal) would also mean owning up to the failure of those aims postwar, without any compensating sense of 'at least standing on the side of democratic civilization in our period of gentle decline'.

There is nothing gentle about the disasters threatening British monopoly capitalist existence (Lloyds, Warburgs); and as for the delights of democratic civilization, let Churchill speak for himself:

The P.M. said the Hindus were a foul race "protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due" and he wished Bert Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them. After dinner we saw an amusing film: Bob Hope in The Princess and the Pirate. Then we sat in the Great Hall and listened to The Mikado played, much too slowly, on the gramophone. The PM said it brought back "the Victorian era, eighty years which will rank in our island history with the Antonine age". Now, however, "the shadows of victory" were upon us. In 1940 the issue was clear and he could see distinctly what was to be done. But when Harris had finished his destruction of Germany, "What will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?"

After this war, continued the PM, we should be weak, we should have no money and no strength and we should be between the two great powers of the USA and the USSR.

Renewed imperialist crisis has wound up the phony Cold War equilibrium and exposed as fiction all the barmy 'Soviet expansionism' paranoia. But the underlying fear of revolution was not barmy at all, and this gloomy tabletalk from February 1945 speaks volumes about how the British ruling class really felt about the imminent loss of empire and the dawning of 'Pax Americana'.

Despite the imperialist character of the war so far as Britain's involvement was concerned, many workers who saw the counter-revolutionary imperialist ideology of fascism getting routed by the Red Army, and felt that they themselves had a class-stake in this defeat of fascism, started to draw lessons from the experience which temporary cynical bourgeois war propaganda about 'gallant Russian allies' had not at all intended.

It took the whole expensive edifice of welfare capitalism to drown out workers' suspicions about the real imperialist aims of the bourgeois running the war and their memories of the kind of roused class-consciousness which for example prompted the Communist-tending discussions around the soldiers' 'Cairo parliament'.

Not for nothing did the establishment consent to bundle Churchill into a corner and let the Labour party get on with the job of rehabilitating capitalist class rule with a welfarist face. The bullying elitist class arrogance which Churchill represented had to be shelved for a time as too provocative. Only later did the bourgeoisie feel they could resume the construction of the sick personality cult around Churchill, as part of the whole effort to take the class sting out of memories about the war.

The Churchill cult commands all-party devotion because an attack upon it is simultaneously an attack on the bourgeois falsification of the Second World War in which all bourgeois parties have a stake.

Again, the suicide-bug which inspired Major to win electoral prestige by going to Derry to commemorate the Irish dimension of WW1I equally infects the rest of imperialist Westminster.

It was Callaghan's Labour party that sent in the troops 25 years ago which are getting ready to throw in the towel against Irish national liberation now, and the imperialist humiliation of this retreat undermines Blair and Ashdown quite as much as it does Major.

British imperialism is now universally despised the length and breadth of Ireland. Everyone knows that it is British imperialist decline and Irish national revolutionary success which are forcing the 'peacemaking' hat onto Major. The timewasting obstacles to reunification which Britain half-heartedly continues to erect can only increase the contempt with which the humiliated and retreating bourgeois state is regarded.

Reminding the Irish of the two imperialist wars this century in which their fathers and grandfathers died (to be rewarded by Partition after the first, and counter-revolutionary war for the last 25 years) can only increase their contempt for imperialism.

And reminding the Orange fascist ascendency that their privileged existence as colonial gauleiters in the occupied zone of Ireland, now going down the pan, was supposed to be a permanent reward for loyal services rendered to an Empire on which the sun would never set, can only increase the impotent despair of imperialism's redundant stooges.

Small wonder that the Derry visit was the occasion for the frustrated RUC rabble to fly off the handle and wade into a peaceable and well conducted Sinn Féin demonstration, thereby earning further street-fighting humiliations for themselves at the hands of the contemptuous Derry citizenry.

And more revealing still was the much less well publicized East Belfast Orange lodge VE parade a few days later which spontaneously degenerated into a lumpen orgy of looting and destruction, hospitalizing some of their own RUC gang sent to the scene, and completely trashing an off-licence.

British imperialism's temporary lucky break in staying on the winning side in the last two imperialist wars was never a victory for the working class or 'democracy'. Nor is the long-overdue end of this streak of luck, as renewed imperialist crisis exposes geriatric British imperialist positions to more and more ruthless competitive rivalry, a defeat for workers.

The rise of fascism in Germany and elsewhere in the '20s and '30s, which set in train a counter-revolutionary CLASS war waged by the bourgeois ruling class against its own proletariat, was BACKED by imperialism internationally as a "bulwark against Bolshevism". The Western 'democracies' ONLY turned against the axis powers at the point where their usefulness (as counter-revolutionary suppressors of revolution in the West and of unimpeded socialist development in the Soviet Union) started to be seriously overtaken by the imperialist threat they posed as rivals to their own monopoly domination of the planet.

The current misfiring of all these attempts to take people's minds off the news in 1995 by retelling a sanitized version of the news from 1945 is very bad for the whole establishment, and not just for the electorally stricken Tories. ANY capitalist party that wants to be part of the next phase of bourgeois political life is going to be relying more and more heavily on promoting the crassest middle-class chauvinist prejudices, all the way ultimately to khaki elections. But on present performance, they look to have their work cut out for them.

As soon as the media were obliged to stop pretending it was 1945 (and a 1945 that never existed at that), all the major news stories breaking at once pointed straight back to the divisions and paralysis afflicting all attempts at imposing imperialist order on the growing crisis. In addition to the City's nightmares about a run on sterling, the declining dollar is faced with new shocks as Washington knocks the Vancouver trade talks on the head and reverts to open trade-war bullying threats against Japan's superior monopoly performance.

Meanwhile, those same 'freedom-loving Croats' whose fascist boss Tudjman was honoured by a place in the tent for London's 'anti-fascist' VE day celebrations (whilst the Serb heirs to the real anti-fascist partisan tradition got the cold shoulder) are up to their old tricks again in the European civil war imperialism has once more imposed on the Balkans.

Whatever the US's 'peacekeeping' intentions may have been, the practical consequence of their actions (first pretending to 'neutralize' Western Slavonia, and then doing nothing when the US-backed Croat offensive swept through into Pakroc, inventing 'war criminals' on the spot and subjecting escaping refugees to bloody ambush) has been to hold the local imperialist stooges' coats whilst they have a crack at doing in one of the more isolated and vulnerable pockets of Serb resistance.

But the war of words breaking out between the Croats, the UN and the USA (with the UN resentful at being conned by the Croats, and Washington publicly dressing down the UN for failing to call down airstrikes on Serb positions around Sarajevo) is more than anything else evidence of imperialism's paralyzed inability to decisively reimpose ANY kind of hegemonic control over the region.

Teaching its Croat stooges how to run rings around UN incompetence (including the trick of putting Serb POWs beyond the human rights pale by calling them 'war criminals', and the trick of showily handing them over to the jackbooted 'civil police' to deal with, so that the stormtroopers can get on with the blitzkrieging) may look like smart tactics for US imperialism in the short-term.

But the weakness of the UN only reflects the indecision and paralysis of imperialism as a whole, with Washington at its head.

Whilst on paper it might seem possible for the US to extend the logic of what it is already doing, - brazen out its role in training up the Croat fascist heirs of Ante Pavelic, start openly arming the 'Bosnian' reactionaries, and go on to simply shoulder the UN aside and impose its authority on the Balkans unilaterally through its proxies, - it is only necessary to spell this out in order to see at once what a quagmire this would lead US imperialism into. Once Washington decisively tears up the whole hypocritical set-up of 'international law' which played such a key role throughout the Cold War in making the US writ run, how can ailing US authority ever hope to restore its world imperialist stranglehold? With its trade and currency wars with Japan and Germany hotting up all the time, Washington is in no position to start finding proxy substitutes for all the Canadians, Norwegians, Nigerians, Argentinians, Pakistanis and Irish with which the UN traditionally plugs the gaps in imperialist hegemony.

Yet if Washington FAILS to break decisively with the moribund UN and make ITS leadership the decisive one in the "New World Order" (declared ad nauseam but still nowhere in sight), it will more and more come to share in the UN's own paralyzed incompetence. And meanwhile the trade-war rivalry from Japan and Germany presses ever closer.

Only the struggle for proletarian dictatorship science can lead the way forward out of the warmongering chaos into which imperialist rule is now disintegrating.

Fight for Leninism.

Build the ILWP.

DH [Dominic Hull]